No, Mr Kibet never really ‘admitted to’ doing anything

To confess a crime is a sign that you are truly sorry and perhaps have resolved never to repeat it.

But please come clean even in terms of language.

Never do it in the vein of Nairobi’s newspapers. Simply admit it: never “admit to” it.

I take the latter from page 3 of this week’s Sunday Nation, where a headline writer claimed: “Kibet admits to getting Kabura cash”.

Good of Mr Kibet. But terrible of the sub-editor who wrote that headline.

To be quite sure, if the mea culpa had come out without any form of duress from the prosecution, it might have impressed the judicial official into meting out the lightest of the range of sentences that the law prescribes for such a crime.

In Roman Catholicism, the term mea culpa — literally, “my fault” — refers to a churchgoer’s admission before a priest that the churchgoer has committed some “sin”.

DIPTHONG
Mea culpa might, therefore, be better translated as “I am culpable” or, even better, “I am guilty”.

For English, not Latin, is our language of official communication (even with God).

But Mr Kibet never admitted to anything. He simply admitted it.

In that context, to reiterate, there is no such verb as “to admit to”.

The verb to admit (without the preposition to at the end) has many meanings.

But, in this context, it means to confess or publicly acknowledge responsibility, an error, a mistake, a faux pas.

Faux pas — pronounced a tad like foe-pa (namely, without diphthonging the “foe”) — is an expression that English has long ago borrowed from French.

As we recall, a diphthong is a vowel which, in writing, is single but which, nevertheless, comes out of the mouth as two vowels.

A good example is the single vowel a in the adjective late, which comes from the mouth as two whole vowels.

In other words, through the mouth, the word late is diphthonged almost into lay-it.

For its part, the French expression faux pas — which has long ago invaded English without any formal change — refers literally to a “false step”.

THE GENESIS

As a figure of speech, faux pas came into English probably as long ago as 1066 AD, when a man-on- horseback called Guillaume le Conquerant (“William the Conqueror”), a swaggerer from France’s Normandy, rode roughshod to “bestride the narrow world” of England and, like a Shakespearean Colossus, subdue it for France’s own Normans.

The western littoral of France was called Normandie because at that time it was occupied and ruled by a Germanic tribe called Normans or Norsemen (words which literally meant “Northmen” or, since we are nowadays supposed to be gender-conscious, simply “North-people” — because the rulers had come from the far North.

Guillaume’s own ancestors had romped into France from what is now Scandinavia (namely, Denmark, Sweden and — Nota Bene — Norway), the last one a term whose first syllable, Nor, retains the general Germanic peoples’ original northerliness.

Its second syllable, way, comes from weg, the modern German word for a way or a path.

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